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Tuesday, 28 February 2017

Bird Report

I like birds and
birding. I do not like work and working. Simple. So what happens when birding
becomes working? I’ll tell you. Delay is what happens. Excuses are what happens.
Extreme procrastination and putting things off become the order of the day. I
am of course talking about the London Bird Report, for which I am a contributor, and I am very very behind.It’s a professional-looking A5 sized softback book published by the London Natural History Society. LNHS members get for
free, or it can instead be purchased for a very reasonable sum. It is an entirely voluntary effort from a large number of people and collectively
it takes hours, hundreds of hours. In addition to the immense amount of time
put it by Pete the editor, there is an entire editorial board tasked with
elements of the production. I am on it, I view it as a way of giving back to the birding scene which has given me so much enjoyment over the years. We meet several times a year as we plan the
publication, and each member has quite a lot to do in advance of those
meetings, reaching a veritable crescendo as we approach the end date. Earlier on in the process many other people are involved. There are the local county recorders who chase down and compile the output
of the capital’s birders, and a whole rarities committee to assess the trickier
ones. There is an army of people who write sections of the systematic
list, translating a huge database of daily sightings into meaningful summaries
of individual species. I did “Tits, Crests and Nuthatches” for a couple of years
and it was a very big piece of work indeed. Then there are people who contribute
papers, for example accounts of London sites, or detailed studies of species.
Further people do the gazette, make lists of sites, and a whole host of things I probably don't even realise. My job is to source,
edit, check and caption photographs of birds to accompany the systematic list and
to some extent the accompanying papers. This is not as simple as send out an
email and wait for people to send me lovely photos. It's actually quite a struggle to get enough that are sufficiently decent for print. Once I have them I have to whittle them down to a
shortlist. Then I have get bigger copies of some of them., and then edit almost all of them - noise reduction, straighten
horizons, dust spots, sharpen them up and get them the right size. I have to find
something suitable for the front and rear cover, with enough blank space for
titles, ISBNs and barcodes and so on. I also have to check that they were taken
in London, and that the dates match up with the records on the database. I have
to make sure that I am not reusing a species from a previous year too much, Wheatears excepted, and then I have to write a sensible caption to accompany each image. When all that is done, I have to get the shortlist and the captions over to the
designer and work with him to ensure that the chosen photos actually work with
the blocks of text, trying to avoid instances of a species account on one page
and the photo on a different page. Finally I have to assess the proofs for accurate
colour reproduction. It is an enormous job.And here’s the rub,
that last little three letter word. It is and feels like a job. Like work. And thus
it feels like a chore, a drag, rather than something I genuinely want to spend
my time doing. And so I inevitably leave it to almost the last minute. Although
this has been on my plate for quite some time, and I started gathering the
images many months ago, as of last night I have only written about a third of
the comments. The deadline is today. This evening is when I promised the rest
of the editorial board that I would have everything ready to go, and I am woefully
short of where I wanted to be. I had earmarked several blocks of time to get
this done, including on the flights to Hong Kong and back. All of these slots
came and went without me doing so much as opening the file. So tonight, when I
have finished writing this blog post, I am devoting my entire evening to
getting it done.

To be fair, this is
the final piece of the puzzle. I’ve already done all the selection and editing.
I’ve already sent the editorial board the cover choices for them to vote on (I
don’t vote). I’ve already prepared the file with all the species names and
checked the birds and their dates against the dates captured in the image
files. But Nigel the designer can’t start work until I’ve sent him the final
images and the final captions. So whilst I’ve put in hours and hours already,
hours that by my own admission I don’t really have, none of this means anything
for anyone else until I’ve 100% finished. Anyway, next time you pick up the London
Bird Report, or indeed any bird report produced by any county or recording
area, spare a thought for the hard-working volunteers who have selflessly
devoted hours of their personal time to make sure you have that report in your
hands, year after year.You will be surprised
to hear that none of this is what I had planned to write about. Or maybe not?
No, the spur for this now tangential post was that I was up at 7am today
desperately trying to write a few more of the captions before I had to leave
for work. One of the ones I wrote was for Sedge Warbler, to accompany Russ’s fine image from Rainham on 10th April that I am planning on using. It struck me that for all my talk
of February being pathetically dull and unworthwhile, in a few short weeks local
birding would be an entirely different proposition. And by then I'll have finished the LBR and can get out and enjoy it.